Pedro Flores, an Filipino American immigrant who is known as the “Father Of Yo-Yo”, was born on this day in 1896. So I made a quick drawing to celebrate his birthday.
The yo-yo (also known as the bandolore, incroyable, l’émigrette, and the quiz) had been around for centuries, but Pedro created a new method of attaching the string in the 1920s that allowed the toy to “sleep” when it reached the bottom of the string. Up until his invention, yo-yos only went up and down! In 1932, Pedro sold his company to Don Duncan.
Flores left the Philippines when he was 19 to go to the High School of Commerce in San Francisco. Later, he studied law at the University of California, Berkeley and the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. Though he dropped out of law school to start his own business, he clearly used his legal training throughout his career. For instance, he was savvy enough to trademark the name “Yo-Yo” (a Tagalog word that means “come and go”, according to wikipedia).
It’s also said that Pedro Flores patented his unique method of attaching string around the yo-yo’s axle, but I can not find that patent. It’s possible it’s there and I can’t find it, or that the technique was never actually patented. I tend to believe the latter. When Duncan acquired Flores’ company, he was quite litigious with the “Yo-Yo” trademark, so if there was a patent too, you know Duncan would have tried protecting it as well.
Pedro sold the Flores Yo-Yo Company to Donald Duncan in 1932, but kept working on different yo-yo businesses after the sale. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that when Flores sold his business to Duncan, the contract might not have stipulated a noncompete clause. That’s just a guess, but I imagine he knew enough about law to know that Duncan couldn’t stop him from competing.
Here is a great video by Dr. Lucky about Pedro Flores:
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